> But China ultimately having that power scares me more than an American company having it.
Well for people not from US, China having that power is absolutely better. After all, unlike the US, China hadn't invaded another country or instigated coup for the past 40+ years.
Oh get real. China is equally a bad actor in more modern times. They have massive human rights issues, suppress free speech, took over HK before the agreed upon time. It’s not like they are some angel in this scenario.
It took forty years for the country to begin atonement for the hardships inflicted on its own citizens during WWII, and forty years after that discussion began, we’re again talking about interment camps.
> I think it is unfair to point to military mistakes as undermining all of U.S. credibility.
US didn't invade Iraq and other countries "by mistake". Same with all the coups and regime change operations. If you think these many instances are mistake, well then I have a bridge to sell to you.
We're actually not allowed to talk about them, see the Palestine genocide content being suppressed in US public spaces and social media platforms, but not on Tiktok.
Because in the first half of last year, pro-Palestine discourse has been occupying heavy majority of my social media feeds (twitter, reddit, ig, etc.) without me even engaging with any of that content. Not even mentioning all the pro-Palestine protests outside that I got to witness myself. And I had a chance to witness plenty of anti-Trump protests (both irl and in the media of all kinds) during his first presidency as well. Open any social media, and you will see tons and tons of people talking plenty of very strong anti-Trump and anti-Biden rhetoric.
How well would any of that fly in China?
P.S. If pro-Palestine content was “suppressed in US public spaces and social media platforms,” they were doing a really poor job of it. My IG and twitter feeds were just filled with it, despite me hitting “not interested” on most of it. Meanwhile, TikTok algorithm was actually respecting my preferences, and my feed there was filled with stuff I actually cared to see (like 3d printing projects).
unlike the US, China hadn't invaded another country or instigated coup for the past 40+ years.
No need to invade when you can do neo-colonialism to take over Africa, social media to influence the vote of your primary rival, and forcing a puppet government in Hong Kong (i.e. a coup). Not to mention destroying coral reefs to build artificial islands for military outposts in other nations' waters and blatant sabre rattling against Taiwan and even maritime attacks on peaceful neighbors.
China is regularly swinging their fist within range to tweak noses and crying foul when they're called out on their aggressive behavior. The only reason a war hasn't started is because their victims haven't stood up to their nonsense yet.
> but saying China's power is "better" feels tone-deaf, especially considering places like Hong Kong
I'm no expert on Hongkong, but I'm pretty sure it's nowhere as bad as a genocide where 50% of the victims are children funded and supplied by the US. So yes, China is better.
> Specifically, every one of us who worked in an emergency, intensive care, or surgical setting treated pre-teen children who were shot in the head or chest on a regular or even a daily basis. It is impossible that such widespread shooting of young children throughout Gaza, sustained over the course of an entire year is accidental or unknown to the highest Israeli civilian and military authorities.
Yes you need to get sober first, maybe then you'll realize how absurd it is calling someone who are against Israeli tanks killing children as a 'tanker'.
Yeah, I like how HN keeps increasing the karma threshold for just being able to downvote. I don't often get downvotes, but when I do it's definitely for wrong think and attempting to disarm people with humor. I'm sorry but this platform needs to treat people like humans, and I refuse to be a part of it from this point on because of that. If I could downvote and move on, I'd comment less. This platform is toxic.
I deleted that comment because it got downvotes. Downvote this one too, tech startup incubator trolls.
Edit: Also reaffirming my position the parent commenter is a combative CCP apologizer using irrelevant comparisons, as all the sibling conversation clearly points out.
Edit: I'm done interacting with this platform that ironically doesn't respect people's boundaries and is more of a club house of narrow perspectives centered around increasing wealth for select technical communities.
> The Deir Yassin massacre took place on April 9, 1948, when Zionist paramilitaries attacked the village of Deir Yassin near Jerusalem, Mandatory Palestine, killing at least 107 Palestinian villagers, including women and children.[1] The attack was conducted primarily by the Irgun and Lehi, who were supported by the Haganah and Palmach.[3] The massacre was carried out despite the village having agreed to a non-aggression pact.
> An Israeli army officer who fired the entire magazine of his automatic rifle into a 13-year-old Palestinian girl and then said he would have done the same even if she had been three years old was acquitted on all charges by a military court yesterday.
Netanyahu is a fascist inspired by Mussolini, all the Hamas talk is just an excuse to do ethnic cleansing and complete the settlement of Palestine. They will not stop at that, they will keep expanding into Syria, Lebanon and Egypt.
> Specifically, every one of us who worked in an emergency, intensive care, or surgical setting treated pre-teen children who were shot in the head or chest on a regular or even a daily basis. It is impossible that such widespread shooting of young children throughout Gaza, sustained over the course of an entire year is accidental or unknown to the highest Israeli civilian and military authorities.
> Israel has perpetrated a concerted policy to destroy Gaza’s healthcare system as part of a broader assault on Gaza, committing war crimes and the crime against humanity of extermination with relentless and deliberate attacks on medical personnel and facilities,
I can’t speak knowledgeably about the first point (I doubt many people can, fog of war and all that) but it is well known that Hamas set up command centres in or under hospitals to use them as human shields.
Are you telling me that Hamas deserves none of the blame?
> it is well known that Hamas set up command centres in or under hospitals
This is patently false. Israel single-handedly claimed this without any evidence other than CGI render. Think about it, ALL hospitals in Gaza has been bombed by this point, but have you ever see the actual footage of Hamas command centres?
Also pretty sure there was no Hamas involved in the case below:
> In one of the most egregious cases, the Commission investigated the killing of five-year-old Hind Rajab, along with her extended family, and the shelling of a Palestinian Red Crescent Society ambulance and killing of two paramedics sent to rescue her. The Commission determined on reasonable grounds that the Israeli Army’s 162nd Division operated in the area and is responsible for killing the family of seven, shelling the ambulance and killing the two paramedics inside. This constitutes the war crimes of wilful killing and an attack against civilian objects.
US intelligence agencies agreed with Israel, journalists that have never stepped foot in a Gaza hospital disagreed. I suspect the truth is somewhere in the middle: just because injured combatants are taken to a hospital doesn’t necessarily mean that that hospital is a military command centre. However at least one hospital was more than likely (but not certainly!) used as such.
The tunnels under the Al Haifa hospital were built by Israel and are widely acknowledged to exist.
Do the other hospitals have bunkers and tunnels? I doubt it. They would not be easy to add after initial construction.
The American medical professionals who served in Gaza certainly disagree with Israel. Do you believe them or do you believe the same Israel who made up "40 beheaded babies"?
> The 99 signatories to this letter spent a combined 254 weeks inside Gaza’s largest hospitals and clinics. We wish to be absolutely clear: not once did any of us see any type of Palestinian militant activity in any of Gaza’s hospitals or other healthcare facilities.
> We urge you to see that Israel has systematically and deliberately devastated Gaza’s entire healthcare system, and that Israel has targeted our colleagues in Gaza for torture, disappearance, and murder.
Are they working in these hospitals only with the approval and permission of HAMAS, or are they free to voice an independent opinion without fear of reprisal from armed militants in the middle of a war where a doctor with their head blown off is just a statistic?
I'm not just saying this as an argument, this kind of bias in reporting from volunteers in war zones is common. There was some war in Africa where medics from Doctors Without Borders got in serious trouble because they spoke up about atrocities. If I remember correctly, some were abducted and/or killed. I do remember the head of MSF saying in an interview that they have a policy of keeping quiet because "that's what it takes to be allowed to provide services" under those conditions.
Also: "not once did any of us see any type of Palestinian militant activity in any of Gaza’s hospitals or other healthcare facilities".
Israel was saying that HAMAS had built tunnels under the hospitals, which doctors would not have been allowed into and would not have seen. They most probably told the truth, but that truth may just what they saw... they just didn't see the tunnels.
Last but not least: How would they know if activity was "militant"? HAMAS generally does not wear uniforms!
PS: I do think that at most one hospital might have been used as a HAMAS office... for something. Quite possibly a military medical office, coordinating care for the wounded or something similar. I wouldn't be surprised if Isreali drones saw 'x' HAMAS members walk into the hospital and hence they marked it as a "HAMAS office" based on that intelligence alone. (I always assume there's idiots on both sides of a war. It's an effective and accurate model of reality.)
> Israel was saying that HAMAS had built tunnels under the hospitals
If the tunnels are under the hospitals, why bomb the hospitals then? It won't destroy the tunnels. It will only destroy the hospitals.
IDK what else to say, for some reason you are eager on believing that the same Israel who invented 40 beheaded babies, and the US intelligence who lies about Iraq WMD, are somehow a beacon of truth, despite them never providing a shred of evidence.
> It's like saying our soldiers in Iraq shouldn't have had modern rifles because the invasion of Iraq was wrong
TBF if the US military don't have modern rifles/equipments they will certainly not invade Iraq. So yes, having significantly better weapons does increase the chance of war because it increase your chance of winning (thus make it more politically feasible for politicians to push for it).
Rather than the 5% number (which may be the best they can do with current start of art), what feels more damning to me is that they found a method that can reduce misinformation (by way more than 5%), and then decided to rollback it.
> And this method works. In Myanmar, “reshare depth demotion” reduced “viral inflammatory prevalence” by 25% and cut “photo misinformation” almost in half.
> In a reasonable world, I think Meta would have decided to broaden use of this method and work on refining it to make it even more effective. What they did, though, was decide to roll it back within Myanmar as soon as the upcoming elections were over.
One of the reasons real Communism (the USSR variety, not what people in the US think Communism is) has such a hard time in the capitalist societies: It is the only form of authoritarianism in which corporations cannot make profits.
>It is the only form of authoritarianism in which corporations cannot make profits
It's still the same people making the profits though. Regardless of what political/economic system you have, sociopaths will always gravitate towards whatever position allows them to acquire the most wealth and power. The only difference is whether they have the legal right to send men with guns to lock you up or kill you if you disobey them.
The fact that you lack the ability for creativity and nuance to such a degree that you scream “HAH, Stalin!” anytime someone criticizes the free market says more about you than the point you’re arguing against.
Surely you aren’t asserting the Soviet Union committed no atrocities and was an angelic society of benevolent leaders blessing the harmonious proletariat?
In any society composed of humans, the shitburgers will find a way to shit on the largest groups of people they can using whatever instrument of power is available. In the US it’s dollars, in the USSR, its influence and power.
GP isn’t asserting that. They’re saying that the the western establishment will gladly tolerate right wing authoritarian governments because they allow private companies to run roughshod over everyone in the name of profit.
Oh I misread, sorry. In that case you’re completely correct. The right holding up dictatorships like Chiang Kai Shek, Pinochet, and Park regimes as being good are all great examples.
So Facebook is presented with a trolley problem that have people lives on one track and more profit on the other track, and chose the latter, just as what we can expect from big corporations nowadays.
Not an unexpected decision overall, but it did surprise me how low Facebook can stoop. Like, they didn't even bother to fix their stuff in Myanmar after all these years with Myanmar being the poster child of their hate speech problem!
> In 2022, Global Witness came back for one more look at Meta’s operations in Myanmar, this time with eight examples of real hate speech aimed at the Rohingya—actual posts from the period of the genocide, all taken from the UN Human Rights Council findings I’ve been linking to so frequently in this series. They submitted these real-life examples of hate speech to Meta as Burmese-language Facebook advertisements.
I promise you Meta doesn't give a shit about the $8 in ads its getting from Myanmar per year. This is more an issue of a giant corporation not noticing that some users in a foreign country speaking in a foreign language were doing horrible things with their platform. At worst its negligence. If it wasn't for the Facebook association most HN users would not even know Myanmar was in a civil war at all.
(Keep in mind after this, Facebook hired 20,000+ content moderators at great expense who they still employ to monitor for stuff like this).
According to the article, Facebook did make the deliberate decision not to dedicate resources to Myanmar and other non-western countries, so I don't think it's negligence. "Greed" is more appropriate.
> Guy Rosen, Facebook’s VP of Integrity, told Sophie Zhang that the only coordinated fake networks Facebook would take down were the ones that affected the US, Western Europe, and “foreign adversaries.”
That's frankly sensible? There are three hundred+ countries on earth, to monitor all of their "fake networks" would take an organization like the CIAs. It's like saying its greed that Apple doesn't solve the family issues of all their workers. its not reasonable.
> its greed that Apple doesn't solve the family issues of all their workers. its not reasonable.
Of course it's greed, and of course it's reasonable. Apple is directly responsible for the work conditions of its workers and the contractors they use, absolutely. If they can't be responsible then they can close shop. There is no obligation for them to have a business.
Maybe they should consider not operating in countries where they unmonitored presence may lead to genocide?
There's no obligation to operate everywhere. Instead, as discussed in previous parts, they invested heavily to get a monopoly in third world countries.
I have a hard time following this reasoning. I would definitely consider Facebook partly responsible for this genocide if they had deliberately made an editorial decision to spread the genocidal rhetoric.
But they didn't. The situation was as you put it mostly unmonitored. In other words, the spread of genocidal content was organic. This is the equivalent of blaming the phone company or the ISP for what the users do with the communication channels.
Yes, a history of trying to get to the truth of matters even if it's not popular in the zeitgeist.
Look at fsociety's comment in this same thread to see just how much misinformation is out there (which he helpfully corrects)
It just so happens a lot of misinformation is anti-corporate since many people want to believe every bad thing they hear about them. So I end up being one of the few commenters who say, actually, the big company did try here.
This is important because if every big company is supposed to be equally bad, there's no reputational penalty for the actually bad ones.
Funny, talking about the truth when your comment history is neck deep in right wing conspiracy and talking points.
The point people are making here is that Facebook shouldn't have done the impossible and created a perfect tech solution to moderate content, they should not have operated in these countries at all if they couldn't do it safely. They did not even try, instead they ignored internal reports on these problems for years and actively decided to make the problem worse with their single focus of growth. And for as you put it, only a few $ in advertisements, to fuel the fires of genocide.
Considering I've voted only democratic in every election in my life, and volunteered to help progressive candidates manage their campaigns in swing states, you're waaaay off base on my politics.
I really don't want to ask this since it run contrary to HN rules, but did you really read the article?
No one expect Facebook to remove all misinformation/hate speech/etc. That is unreasonable. But they have literally 1 data scientist to monitor the whole non-western world.
In a year where their annual profit is $23.9bn.
Assuming 1 data scientist is paid $500k/year, surely it is sensible to dedicate $20mn, less than 0.1% of their annual profit, to hire 40 more such data scientist and literally increase their effectiveness on this topic by 4000%? At the very least, this is what I expect from a company that actually have a speck of moral.
> A strategic response manager told me that the world outside the US/Europe was basically like the wild west with me as the part-time dictator in my spare time. He considered that to be a positive development because to his knowledge it wasn’t covered by anyone before he learned of the work I was doing.
When you write “they have literally 1 data scientist to monitor the whole non-western world”, I assume you mean Sophie Zhang. I agree with a lot of what she said, and I mean a lot, but you have a misconception.
The integrity org, back when I was there, had thousands of folks and was aggressively hiring. They were not a lone island and were also supported by other orgs like data infra, FAIR, security, privacy, product teams and more.
Site integrity, Sophie’s team, was a small piece of the work done there. And they, like any team, relied heavily on other teams. You have all this unbelievable tooling internally, and internal teams are incentivized to get you to use it.
These issues were not from want of trying. The reality is that problems like this at scale are incredibly difficult. In my opinion, Frances trivialized a lot of this in her whistleblowing, but it makes a good news story so what can you do.
It pains me when people trivialize it as “just do the machine learnings to fix it all” or “if these tech companies actually gave a damn this wouldn’t be an issue”. It’s an incredibly hard problem, and much like security it will never be “solved”.
That doesn’t excuse when technology has a bad effect on the world. We need to be better, and for the most part as a society we are trying hard as hell. It’s also why the work is interesting and impactful. More should get into it.
I talked to FB people (recruiters, managers) in the site integrity team back in 2018. Admittedly I had some reservations up front, but during the on-site day I made up my mind to never even consider FB as a potential employer again. During a chat session between interviews, I asked about the prospect of doing proactive education - essentially, detecting users who had been caught in the influence operations and then surfacing them a note that they had been targeted by such activities, so that they could themselves make educated decisions.
The senior manager I was talking with at the time was visibly taken aback by the very idea. "We don't do that!"
From that experience I drew the inference that FB are fundamentally, as an organisation, incapable of doing the right thing. I suspect it's less about the cost, and more about the prospect of openly accepting accountability for what their platform is really used for.
> I promise you Meta doesn't give a shit about the $8 in ads its getting from Myanmar per year.
They did certainly care about the growth of daily active users even if it meant they expanded to markets where they couldn't responsibly moderate their platform.
A company as big as Facebook is going to have different groups with different objectives that often do not see eye to eye or even know about each other. A company as profitable as Facebook is going to have projects that are motivated by things other than profits.
There is most likely a team at Facebook whose goal it is to get as many users as possible in developing markets. These markets do not generate profits from online ads. Facebook will never disclose its cost per user but in general online ads only make money from affluent users. I have heard that even mid income countries like Mexico or Romania are not profitable for ads. A place where people make an average of $3 a day is wildly unprofitable for Facebook and even the most optimistic development projections will not make them profitable for several decades. The OP is spot on that the amount of money that Facebook will ever receive from Myanmar is negligible.
Based on conversations with people at Facebook I generally get the sense that people there (especially at the top) have a strong sense of mission and a belief that their product makes the world a better place (I disagree with this but that doesn't change the fact). I would guess that these the project tasked with increasing users in developing countries is viewed more as philanthropy than business.
> Facebook hired 20,000+ content moderators at great expense who they still employ to monitor for stuff like this
Part II of this series addresses this stat. During the peak genocidal years it seems there were only a handful of mods assigned to Myanmar, and none of them lived in Myanmar. To this day it sounds like there still may not be more than a hundred people moderating Myanmar content. Which is inline with the 20K number: 195 countries * 100 moderators per country = 19.5K mods total
I guess my main idea here is that when I look at the back-of-envelope numbers it's easy to see how even 100 moderators would have trouble keeping up with the content that millions of people produce. So you really do need those automated moderation tools to be effective.
Can someone please continue the thought experiment by estimating how much content each mod can review in a day, then extrapolating up to a week or month, and comparing to an estimate of how much content was actually posted on Facebook in the similar timeframe? I believe Part I or II provides an estimate like that.
Why "nowadays" ? In which century did big corporations behave responsibly ?
Of course Facebook didn't fix anything in Myanmar - the new junta government is both the one running the troll farms and responsible for the previous genocide !
Well for people not from US, China having that power is absolutely better. After all, unlike the US, China hadn't invaded another country or instigated coup for the past 40+ years.
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